Zombie flies and the future of AI
How a parasitic fungi with over 600 distinct species worldwide could teach artificial intelligence algorithms how to control the mind of humans.
On one hand artificial intelligence is the harbinger of the next step in the evolution of human beings and on the other, it also brings up some more unnerving notions of how this could all pan out. AI will find solutions for a cornucopia of problems facing humanity, from climate change to poverty and disease.
The current algorithms scouring through the internet and scientific research papers, will eventually come up with innovative ways to cure various forms of cancer as well, creating self-learning grids that will make traffic jams a thing of the past and even eliminate headaches. But we have to be realistic here, with good comes bad, the world is not linear, it exists in a multitude of dimensions expressed through the laws of physics exhibited in nature.
Anyone who has paid attention to the work of Sir David Attenborough will be aware of the more brazenly scary aspects of the natural world. It’s not all fluffy kittens and harmless tortoises, nature is filled with species of animals and plants that make life a living hell for some.
Bionics is the study of the natural world from an engineer’s perspective. Whether employing the unique physiology and body shape of the kingfisher bird to aerodynamically optimise the contour and design of bullet trains in Japan, to ship hulls mimicking the thick skin of dolphins, bionics looks to nature for inspiration in how to improve our world. AI is very much involved in looking at the natural world to help in this quest. Now as we learned from Attenborough, nature can be very dangerous too. Here’s a thought, what if AI started looking at the darker elements of the natural world and implementing these into engineering feats without us knowing?
Some years back my brother and I came up with the ingenious idea of making a film about the cordyceps fungus. We had both watched the brilliant Attenborough BBC footage of this fungus infecting the mind, muscle and exoskeleton of ants, effectively turning these into empty vessels or “zombie” ants, with the sole purpose of getting the ant body to a place that suited the fungus in temperature, humidity and height, for it to eventually spore and spread its 30 000 spores a second out to another patch of the rain forest. The fungus releases chemicals that hijack the neural architecture of insects, effectively controlling all of their body movements.
The film we were going to make had this fungus (surprise, surprise) jump the species barrier into humans, wreaking havoc on an entire island (in this case New Zealand, which would get closed off and isolated from the rest of the world.) This species jumping is not that far fetched, it happens all the time in the world of microbes. Look at covid and how it jumped from bats into humans. Initially only believed to infect ants, the cordyceps fungus has now been found in over 100 insects, including fruit flies, tarantula spiders, dung beetles and more. There are 600 species worldwide and most are found in rain forests.
Now, the AI algorithm GPT3 is currently scrolling through trillions of data sets online, what if it came across the cordyceps research and found a way to bionically mimic what cordyceps does in insects, in humans? Sounds like science fiction? Think again. These parasitic fungi have evolved over billions of years to hone in on a way of propagating that benefits them the most. There are other examples of parasitism in the natural world, thousands actually, the parasitic wasps that lay eggs that infect ladybugs, rendering them inert with the sole purpose of guarding these wasp eggs is another freaky display of this type of malevolent behaviour. Cordyceps is next level though, and guess what? It doesn’t stop here.
It gets worse
There is another species of parasitic fungi that infects Drosophila flies, meet entomophthora. Entomophthora is a fungus that infects flies and takes over the neural wiring of these insects, and guess what, it can even for a brief period commandeer the fly to actually beat its wings and take off! But here comes the kicker, it is not the fungus doing all of the hijacking, recently researchers in Berkeley, California analysed the genome of this fungus and guess what they found? RNA from a virus. A virus from a relatively obscure family called iflaviruses. It wasn’t just a little bit of RNA, it was nearly 20% of the fungal genome, leading researchers to hypothesise that this virus had infected the fungus nearly 1 billion years ago and as such was the mastermind puppeteer behind all this body hijacking. This fungal viral interaction is notoriously hard to study in a lab, so most of the research has to happen in vivo, in the wild - which means we are only at the surface of understanding what is going on here.
So from an innocent film project investigating what would happen if a parasitic fungus would infect the brain of humans, to the very realistic notion of AI, managing to mimic the exact chemical processes in these fungi to infect humans and thus control their brains, we might not be far off from that zombie apocalypse that surmises the plot of nearly every TV show on Netflix.
Mushroom risotto anyone?
In other news
Mouse stem cells grown in vitro into synthetic embryos, have been manipulated into growing a beating heart and even parts of a mouse brain. This brilliant experiment at Cambridge, built on 5 years of work by Dr Zernicka-Goetz, placed several mouse embryos in close proximity with (trophoblast) cells that usually make up the placenta and then incubating these for some time. The resulting successful embryonic development, led the team to believe that they could coax the growth of individual organs using a similar method of keeping the growing stem cells nearby cells that have specific functions in the desired organs. The amazing thing about the brain growth was that they managed to grow a nearly functioning fore brain, which, considering the complexity of the brain, is a monumental feat. Trial with human embryos are ongoing and the future for in vitro organ growth and transplant is great. But maybe we shouldn’t hold our breaths just yet, as the human brain is the functionally most complex thing in the entire universe.
Good luck growing that.
Oh Carl Sagan, how much we wish you were right here. But it will happen. One day.
You’ll be glad to hear that my hiatus is now over, and I am back to bringing you some smoothly gleaned scribbles. If you have an idea for a topic please leave it in the comment section below. Muchas gracias!
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I just wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone for the feedback on my last article, you guys are amazing. Was also completely humbled by the amount of subscriptions and donations that came in the last weeks. Incredible. Blown away.
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Cracking stuff Chris !
Brilliant writing as always my clever friend. 👏